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Comment by empressplay

1 day ago

You can double click on any part of the top title bar (that doesn't have buttons in it) for example in Calendar you can double click beside the magnifying glass in the top right and it will maximize the window.

9 comments

empressplay

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al_borland  1 day ago

This is running "zoom". When I try it in Finder, it doesn't make the window full screen, it actually made it smaller.

When I use the Window menu, Zoom replicates what double-clicking the top title bar does, while Fill maximizes the window. This holds true with the behavior you describe in Safari as well.

It just seems like a lot of apps treat Zoom and Fill the same now (I tried Calendar, Notes, TextEdit, and NetNewsWire), which adds to the confusion.

ezst  1 day ago

I don't understand how we keep hearing so often here about Apple OSes being so amazingly simple, approachable and cleverly designed with a lot of attention paid to detail, while every practical productivity advice involves some undiscoverable trick, or combinations of tricks, that seems so arbitrary and obtuse. I don't like Mac, in large parts because of that. No amount of marketing and peer pressure will convince me of the superior elegance and sophistication of something that hates you for wanting windows maximised. Those hidden tricks only add insult to injury as pervasive reminders of your presumed inadequacy, that you need to suffer to have things your way, and that Apple is magnanimous to even let you have them.

  • al_borland  1 day ago

    Every system has its issues. It's really a question of which issues you can live with and which system ultimately fits your workflow best.

    After I got used to working in windows instead of full screen all the time, I can't really go back. Even on Windows I find myself working the way I do on macOS. Full screening every app made more sense on a 1024x768 screen (or smaller). Once I moved to a widescreen display (which happened to coincide with getting my first mac) running full screen felt like the wrong move most of time.

    Web pages would look something like this:

      |     <- whitespace ->     |  <- content ->  |     <- whitespace ->     |
  |                          | Lorem ipsum     |                          |
  |                          | dolor sit amet, |                          |
  |                          | consectetur     |                          |
  |                          | adipiscing      |                          |
  |                          | elit. Morbi     |                          |
  |                          | convallis ante  |                          |

    Making the window smaller meant less wasted space and less blinding white space. Once I got used to that idea, it carried over to most other apps.

    • ezst  8 hours ago

      > After I got used to working in windows instead of full screen all the time, I can't really go back.

      Sorry if this comes across as disrespectful, but it smells like Stockholm Syndrome. You are choosing not to use the full extent of your screen estate, and that is your fine choice, but that is no excuse for making it hard. If you compound the whitespace, the thick borders and the generally oversized UI controls, not much of "productive space" remains available to get the work done. I am not interested in macOS as a content-consumption-first vehicle, though that's clearly where Apple is steering.

    • somat  21 hours ago

      It is situational but I think on a modern wide screen(or screens) if it is a single text-like document(like a web page or a terminal) you want 2 or perhaps 3 side by side. if the app implements it's own window management(like blender) a single full screen is best. Overlapping windows are important to have, but almost never desirable, it usually happens because you ran out of room.

    • hedora  1 day ago

      The problem I have with this is that I was using a 1600x1200 21" display in 2000, and got used to workflows for it back then.

      I am currently running a 16" display at a similar fractional scaled resolution (because Apple stopped understanding DPI after shipping the first LaserWriter, apparently).

      Over that time, my eyes have not gotten better to match display DPI, so I'd rather have web sites just adjust the font size so that there are a reasonable number of words per line instead of rendering whitespace.

      Non-full-screen windows would make more sense if Apple supported tiling properly, like most Linux WMs and also modern Windows.

      MacOS sort of supports tiling in a "program manager shipped it + got promoted" sort of way, but you have to hover over the window manager buttons, which is slower than just manually arranging stuff. If there are any keyboard shortcuts to invoke tiling, or a way to change the WM buttons to not suck, I have not found them.

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  • chongli  1 day ago

    Apple OSes being so amazingly simple, approachable and cleverly designed with a lot of attention paid to detail

    That was the Mac in the 1990s. It was designed for, and highly usable with, a one-button mouse. It didn't have hidden context menus or obscure keyboard shortcuts. Everything was visible in the menu bar and discoverable. The Finder was spatially aware with a high degree of persistence that allowed you to develop muscle memory for where icons would appear onscreen every time you opened a folder.

    There was almost nothing hidden or lurking in the background, unlike today (my modern Mac system has 500 running processes right now, despite having only 15 applications open). We've had decades of feature creep since the classic Mac OS, which has made modern Macs extremely hard to use (relatively speaking).